'Crisis in Six Scenes': Woody, chopped
Woody Allen has made a TV series for Amazon - or rather, he's taken what might have been a passably mediocre Woody Allen movie and chopped it up into six little parts, each clocking in at a little more than 20 minutes, and called it "Crisis in Six Scenes," which began streaming on Amazon on Friday.
The result, while generally weak compared with the best of Allen's many films, says more about the uncertainty of both the movie and TV business than anything else. Everyone's still figuring out how digital streaming and viewing on-demand will pay off both financially and creatively; this ongoing experiment has legendary filmmakers (such as the 80-year-old Allen) making new deals with outfits like Amazon. After all, the multiplex is as endangered as the cable box.
In this riff on ideological seduction set in the late 1960s, Allen stars as frustrated writer Sidney J. Munsinger, whose life is upended when Lennie Dale (Miley Cyrus), a radical militant wanted by the FBI, seeks refuge at the suburban Connecticut home Sid shares with his therapist wife, Kay (played by the absolutely adorable Elaine May).
Kay, who knew Lennie as a child and is secretly thrilled by the young woman's activism, welcomes her in and fixes up a guest room for her, while Sid has one classic Allen-style conniption after another, worried that they'll be caught for harboring a fugitive: "I'm the type that gets sodomized in prison," he whines. "I'm fair-skinned and rather shapely."
Lennie's coolly charismatic presence begins to radicalize everyone around her (except Sid), including the talkative gaggle that is Kay's weekly book club, who, on Lennie's recommendation, read Chairman Mao's "Little Red Book" and are soon plotting nude sit-ins and bombings. These scenes are the most entertaining of the series; the rest, especially when it involves Allen, often feels like a padded-out remake of his flaky 1993 caper "Manhattan Murder Mystery," especially when Lennie asks Sid and Kay to perform an act of subterfuge on her behalf.
"We talk the talk, but we never walk the walk," Kay says, urging her husband to help.
"Well, I don't want to walk the walk," Sid replies. "Or shoot the shoot, or bomb the bomb."
It's never quite clear whether Allen's intention here is to send up radical chic in a Tom Wolfe way or if he's simply finding a sort of creative refuge by dialing things back 50 years, so that his characters are free to speak in broad stereotypes and still have it play as humor. It may just be that he's trying a little of this and a little of that, all from his usual bag. There's a hypochondriacal visit to a doctor, just when the viewer is wondering why there yet hasn't been a scene with Allen complaining about his health.
"Crisis in Six Scenes" is the lightest possible treatment of '60s cultural tumult, and, to the show's credit, the period details and costumes are delightful, down to the girlish flip of May's hairdo. The series also offers one more piece of evidence toward an overall theory that Cyrus will wind up being the 21st century's Katharine Hepburn. (Discuss.)
What "Crisis" is not is a TV series. The fact that you'll have to click down to the next episode and press play will seem less like an enthralling binge-viewing experience and more like an excuse for extra bathroom breaks. You'll still be finished with it in about two hours